In the late 1770's a well-to-do French farmer who had settled in
the Hudson River Valley posed a question that has fascinated
every subsequent generation and reverberated through American
history. "What then is the American, this new man?" asked Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in writing an affectionate sketch
of his adopted country. Crèvecoeur's answer elaborated a claim
already advanced by another recent arrival from Europe, Tom
Paine. Paine famous revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense
( 1776), was the first stentorian call for independence from Britain. It declared, and Crèvecoeur heartily agreed, that the
Americans are not transplanted Englishmen. They are an inter-
mixture of many European peoples, a nation of immigrants.

The idea that all Americans (except possibly the Indians) once
were immigrants has sometimes been sharply challenged. It has
not appealed to everyone. It is not, as we shall see, entirely true.
It partakes rather of the rich combination of reality and myth
from which national legends arise. The idea is no less important
for that, no less a shaping fact of American life. For almost two
centuries it has provided one standard response to a collective need
for self-definition. It persists today in the meanings that cluster
around the Statue of Liberty. In a posthumous work written for
and attributed to President John F. Kennedy, a little book
entitled A Nation of Immigrants ( 1964), one can find a classic

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